| This is basically what happened to us but for a different reason, the mortgage company never notified us or our attorney that the very first post-petition payment was never received so for two years , every payment we made, in our minds it was for the current month , but in reality the mortgage company was applying it to the month before, we never knew until they filed a motion for relief from stay. We still did not find out then about the missing money order because they sent us a payment history that showed only dates and amounts, no check numbers or anything. At that time they said we owed them $366 in arrears and our attorney negotiated with their attorneys that we would pay $475 in attorney's fees, not the $875 they were charging. They wrote up a stipulation where it said we would pay for our arrears and attorney's fees in a certain amount of time , the motion was dismissed. We paid immediately after that but we came to find out this past April that they filed another motion for defaulting the terms of the stipulation , and they sought relief from stay and it was granted. After that we received another payment history spreadsheet , this one showed dates, amounts, check numbers ( or money order numbers ) and that's when we saw there was one money order not posted, I called the money order company , sure enough the money order was still uncashed!
Our attorney filed a motion against the mortgage company this time but before that the judge had to force the mortgage company to reinstate the automatic stay because the stipulation did not include a "drop dead clause" in other words, if we defaulted the terms of the stipulation , they can not just file for a motion and get granted relief, there must be a hearing before anything is granted.
Of course there has been a big problem with my company and their accounting, I found out later on that the actual $366 we paid were mostly late fees but they " thought" it was arrears. It was also proven to them that they didn't catch their own mistake until this year and they used the default of the stipulation as a resource to collect the money , but once they were showed all the evidence and all the payments we had made on time and not having missed any payments, they had no other alternative but to reinstate the automatic stay.
The funny thing is that in the process of all this, we have found so many mistakes that we are taking them to court for all the inaccuracies, they are doing the imposible for us to drop the case, we will but only if we achieve what we want. Our attorney is having fun with them, their attorney keeps calling him and trying to make deals. | 
07-17-2003, 03:05 AM
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